America has spent more rebuilding Afghanistan than it spent rebuilding Europe under the Marshall Plan

[jetfx]

@anon61221983

And this was a huge problem with Marx’s work (as great and important as it is). He was still somewhat hamstrung a bit in teleology, I think, and in sticking with the notion that the developments in Europe were universally applicable and represented the inherent human mode of progress. Let’s not forget his belief in the “asiatic” mode of production, as something of an aberation rather than an example of human variability of social structures:

There’s a great book called Marx at the Margins which fairly convincingly argues that Marx’s later work abandons unilinear and teleological notions of social development that were present in the Communist Manifesto. Instead, the book argues, Marx’s research into non western societies led him to develop a more complex outline of how societies develop. That the specific historical circumstances of a given society should be emphasized over any model of universal stages, and how the existence of capitalist modernity somewhere means that the world market will start transforming pre capitalist societies however it finds them. Of course much of this remained unpublished for more than a century so the “stagist” idea stuck around too long.